Children of Exile Read online

  See? I told myself. We’ll be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.

  Those were the words I began passing out, intoning them as I moved down the aisle.

  Then I got to a row of seats that looked empty until I was right beside it.

  Edwy was crouched down in that row. He had the cushioned covering pulled back from the seat, and he was using a nail to scratch something into the metal below. Maybe it was just an ordinary drawing.

  No. Knowing Edwy, it was probably something bad.

  “Couldn’t you help?” I demanded. “Just this once, couldn’t you do something useful? Couldn’t you try to be a better role model? Two hundred crying children around you, and you—you—”

  I gestured helplessly. Words didn’t exist to tell Edwy what I thought of him.

  Edwy’s face flushed, and he peered up at me from beneath his dark cap of curly hair. His green eyes narrowed. I remembered that he and I hadn’t spoken directly to each other in more than a year.

  “Really?” he said. “They think we should sit down and shut up and not even make a peep while they ruin our lives. And you want me to help?”

  It was my turn to go red in the face. I could feel it.

  “Oh, and what you’re doing is better?” I asked.

  Bobo tugged on my hand.

  “Are you and Edwy fighting?” he asked. His tears, never completely dried to begin with, threatened to come back.

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “Edwy and I are just . . . discussing. Discussing is good, remember?”

  Edwy snorted. I fixed him with a steely glare, alternating with quick glances down toward Bobo’s head. Even Edwy should have been able to tell that I was telegraphing, Please don’t say anything to make Bobo or anyone else cry again. Even Edwy should have been able to understand why we didn’t want every kid on the plane sobbing all the way home.

  “Fine,” Edwy said.

  He scrambled up into his seat and clicked the seat belt into place around his waist. He crossed his arms and squeezed his eyes shut. Then he squirmed a little and yelled out, “Everyone, this is how you’re supposed to behave.”

  A second later he was completely still again, an unseeing, unmoving crossed-arm statue.

  “Yeah, thanks a lot, Edwy,” I muttered. “So nice of you to help.”

  I was counting on Edwy to hear the sarcasm in my voice—and counting on Bobo to be too young to notice.

  I couldn’t deal with Edwy just then.

  I stepped on down the aisle to the next row of crying, terrified children who needed my help.

  It was only later, when we were buckled in and about to take off, and I was whispering to Bobo, “We’re fine, we’re fine, we’re going home and you’ll love it there, everything’s going to be okay,” that I let myself think of Edwy again. The image popped into my mind of him sitting like a statue, a smirk frozen on his face. Except—he hadn’t actually stayed perfectly still. There had been the slightest movement in the corner of his eye. Had it been a tic? A twitch? A mostly hidden wink?

  Or was it a tear?

  Had Edwy been crying too?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Where is home?” Bobo asked.

  We were taking off; I had to rip my attention away from the window to answer him.

  “It’s over the mountains and across the sea,” I said. “Remember? You learned about it in school.”

  I could have told him all sorts of names just then: Atlantic, Pacific, Amazon, Nile, Kilimanjaro, Everest, Denali . . . I could have taught him the geography of the entire planet. I could have told him tidbits about all sorts of places: how the golden rice he loved to eat came from the Philippines and Taiwan and America; how the Freds had taken their name from the Norwegian word for peace, since a famous peace prize was given out in Norway. But I didn’t say anything else, because I didn’t want to miss my last glimpse of Fredtown.

  It looked so small now.

  A moment ago we’d been on the ground, and just our one moment of traveling had made the crowd of Freds at the airport shrink down so completely that I had to squint to be sure they were still there. Then Fredtown was just tile roofs and leafy trees and the grid of streets; then the streets and the trees and the roofs seemed to merge, and the only feature I could make out for sure was the broad smear of green in the middle of Fredtown that had to be the park.

  “I want to see!” Bobo said, tugging on my arm.

  Just one moment, I thought. I just wanted one moment to myself, to feel my own feelings and think my own thoughts. And to say good-bye in my own way.

  But I sat back so Bobo could see out the window too. He strained forward against his seat belt.

  “Clouds,” he said. “We’re swimming in clouds.”

  I looked again—he was right. Fredtown was too far behind us to see anymore, and now we were surrounded by what seemed to be white cotton batting. From school, I knew the clouds were just water vapor, but it looked like we could step out the window onto the nearest cloud; it looked like we could bounce and tumble and jump from cloud to cloud like they were the greatest playground ever.

  Maybe we would do that, all us kids from Fredtown. Maybe we’d just stay in the clouds and play forever. And never go home.

  A sudden gap opened in the clouds, and I gasped.

  “Oh, look, Bobo, it’s the Old One,” I said. “The mountain we always see far off in the distance from Fredtown—this is what it looks like from above.”

  Below us, the mountain was a mottled green and brown—no, those were just shadows from the clouds. My eyes were playing tricks. The mountain itself was solid rock, strong and enduring, a gentle watchman who’d stood by Fredtown for as long as anyone could remember. I blinked back tears—I hadn’t thought I’d get this one last glimpse. If I could, I wouldn’t stay and play in the clouds; I’d stay and gaze at the Old One.

  “Take it with us,” Bobo demanded. “Take Old One, too!”

  He was working himself up to a tantrum; with a little more air in his lungs, he could have become hysterical.

  “Don’t worry, Bobo,” I said, putting my arm around him. “There’s a mountain waiting for us at home, too. It’s just got a different name. Remembrance. Can you say that?”

  “ ’Membrance,” Bobo muttered, making the word sound sad and ominous.

  The plane jerked just then, seeming to jump a few feet higher in the sky for no reason. I’d never been on a plane before; was this normal? All around us, kids started shrieking. I expected the pilot or one of the other adults to speak over the intercom system and calm everyone down, but that didn’t happen.

  I unbuckled my seat belt and stood up.

  “Everyone! Everyone! Stop screaming!” I yelled in my loudest voice, trying to make it carry over shrieks and sobs and moans. I tried to figure out what a Fred might say. “We’re fine! It’s just turbulence! Planes do that sometimes. Just keep your seat belts on and everything will be okay!”

  I think some of the kids around me heard and settled down, but I was near the back of the plane; the kids at the front would have had to be terrified.

  I took a step toward the aisle.

  And then the PA system crackled to life. There was a sound like static, and then a man’s angry voice said, “Girl in the back, sit down and put your seat belt back on. How dumb are you? Do you want to be killed?”

  Did he just call me dumb? I thought numbly. Dumb? He did. He really did.

  “Dumb” was one of those words that could only be used for objects or animals—a dog might be called, sympathetically, a “poor dumb beast.” Or someone who was really mad might say, “My dumb pencil broke.” But all the adults in Fredtown had drilled into us that we should never call another child dumb; no matter how furious we got, we were never allowed to blurt out, “Well, you’re just dumb!”

  Every now and then a kid slipped up, and that led to long, patient talks from one of the Freds about how awful it was to hurt another person’s feelings.

  How could an adult call someone d
umb?

  I wanted so badly to go to the man on the PA system and explain, Yes, I know I’m putting my life at risk—a little bit—by taking my seat belt off and standing up. But I’m doing it for a good cause. I’m trying to soothe the little kids. That’s brave and kind, not dumb.

  I wanted to defend myself against that awful label, “dumb.” I thought that would have counted as standing up for my own rights. Not as being rude or disrespectful.

  Then I realized Bobo was tugging on my arm and screaming hysterically, “Rosi, don’t be killed! Please, please don’t die!”

  The little girl at the end of our row, six-year-old Aili, was screaming, “Don’t want anyone killed! Want to go back to Fredtown!”

  As far as I could tell, every kid on the plane was now screaming just as loudly as Bobo and Aili. Maybe even Edwy was. Maybe even I was. It was that word, “killed.” It was like a match put to the dry tinder of the worries and fears and sorrow of leaving behind our Fred-parents and everything we’d ever known. It was like the whole plane had been engulfed.

  I had to do something. I had to do something for all the kids, not just Bobo and Aili and the others near me.

  “Shh, shh, don’t worry,” I told Bobo and Aili. I pulled my arm away from Bobo’s grasp. He cried even harder, but that couldn’t be helped right now.

  “Everything will be okay,” I told Bobo and Aili. “I’m going to fix this.”

  It took a lot of courage, but I stepped out into the aisle. I walked as quickly as I could toward the front of the plane, toward the little sectioned-off compartment where the adults—the non-Fred adults—were sitting.

  Kids screamed louder as I passed, but I didn’t stop. I just kept muttering, “Don’t worry, don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right. . . .”

  I was pretty sure nobody heard me. I kept going anyway.

  The man on the PA system didn’t say anything else, but as I neared the front of the plane, I could see one man facing backward, glaring out at me from the sectioned-off compartment. The closer I got, the more he glared. It was like walking toward storm clouds.

  When I was about six rows away, the man shouted at me, “Are you a total idiot? Completely stupid? Sit down!”

  I’d never heard the words “idiot” or “stupid” before, but from the way he said them, I guessed they was like “dumb,” only worse. I guessed they were such horrible words that no one had been allowed to use them in Fredtown at all.

  I kept walking.

  “I can help you calm the children down,” I said. “So they don’t cry for hours. So they’re not traumatized.”

  The man gaped at me. He had gray, scruffy whiskers growing along his jawline. I couldn’t decide if he wanted them to look that way or if he’d just been haphazard about shaving.

  “I don’t care if they cry,” he said, shrugging. “That’s what kids do. That’s why we all brought earplugs.” He popped something small and white out of one of his ears and held it up. Then he pointed over his shoulder into the compartment, where I could see what seemed to be stacked bassinets. Each one was labeled with a name, and contained a baby covered in tubes and wires. “And see? That’s why the automatic tenders we have the babies in are soundproofed.”

  As he spoke, one of the babies began squirming and flailing his arms and legs. His face turned red. I couldn’t hear anything, but he was clearly crying. Instantly a tube zoomed up to his mouth and he began sucking, even though tears still hung in his eyelashes.

  I gasped.

  “Babies need personal attention,” I told the man. Maybe he just didn’t know. “They need skin-to-skin contact, and—”

  The man snorted.

  “Oh, a little automation never hurt anyone,” he said. “And it might kill me if I had to deal with crying babies for this whole trip. I wish the regulations let us put you all in isolation units. Little kids—ugh. But if the crying bothers you, well, I’m sure eventually they’ll cry themselves to sleep. Then they’ll be quiet.”

  This was like talking to Edwy. There were so many things wrong with what this man was saying, I didn’t know where to begin.

  “But, but . . .”

  A lump was growing in my throat, a lump fed by being called “dumb” and “a total idiot.” A lump that probably would have been there anyway from leaving the Freds behind, from seeing Fredtown and the Old One for the very last time. From having to shake Bobo’s hand off my arm and walk away from him when he was scared and crying.

  I tried to ignore the lump and talk past it.

  “My idea was, if we go ahead and feed the kids early—like now—maybe they’ll get distracted,” I said. “They’ll forget how sad they are and settle down.”

  Something in the man’s face shifted. It looked like he wanted to laugh at me. Just to be mean, not because he thought something was funny.

  “Oh, no,” the man said. “I didn’t sign on to provide food service for spoiled brats. I’m just the hired muscle. I’m just transporting cargo from one set of crazies to another. I’m not your parents. I’m not your precious Freds. Forget what I said about sitting down so you don’t get your head bashed in from the turbulence. I don’t care what you do. If you’re too much of an idiot to follow simple orders, that’s not my problem.”

  The whole time we’d been talking, I’d been standing in the aisle and the man had been leaning his head out from his compartment, where he was safely belted in. But now he pulled his head back and slid shut a door I hadn’t even known was there.

  He was done talking to me.

  If I wanted to keep talking to him, I would have had to tug the door back open—if it wasn’t locked—and beg him to take his earplugs out again. And peer into his mean, laughing whiskered face.

  I couldn’t do any of that. Not when the lump in my throat kept growing and growing and growing.

  I heard the roar of the screaming, panicked children behind me. I heard the thump of my own heart, sad and trampled and afraid. And I heard a whispering voice in my mind that sounded a bit like Edwy’s:

  The Freds would never have hired a man like that. They wouldn’t. So . . . does that mean it was our own parents who hired him and the other men?

  If that’s the kind of man our parents hired to take care of children, what are our parents like?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We kept flying. The Freds had told us we would fly through darkness and back into light, but even they hadn’t been sure exactly how long the trip would take—or how long it would seem. I knew about time zones; I knew daytime in one place could be night in another, and traveling by plane could trick you into feeling like your days and nights were mixed up. But I hadn’t understood how leaving Fredtown could make me feel like we’d been yanked out of time entirely. Away from everything normal.

  You still have all the other children of Fredtown here with you, I told myself. They need your help. That’s normal.

  After the whiskered man shut the door in my face, I stood there, frozen, for a moment. Then I managed to swallow the lump in my throat—mostly, anyway. I turned around, stood at the front of the plane, and tried one of the clapping games our Fred-teachers always used to start music class.

  Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap . . .

  I was lucky the children of Fredtown were so well trained. Even sobbing, even bawling their eyes out, the kids in the rows nearest me managed to bring their hands together for a feeble response: Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap . . . clap!

  The wailing seemed a little quieter, even at the back of the plane. I went on to our teachers’ next clapping pattern: Clap, clap, cla-claaaap, clap . . .

  This time the response seemed to come from practically every kid on the plane: Clap! Clap!

  I could still hear sniffling and whimpering after that, but at least the loud wailing had stopped.

  “Listen up, everyone,” I said. “How many of you brought food?”

  Hands went up. Because the seat backs were so high and some of the children were so small, there were probably some
hands in the air that I couldn’t even see.

  But I could see two or three kids who kept their hands in their laps. Their faces were twisted with worry now; one little girl’s chin trembled like she was just barely holding back a return of heartbroken wailing. I couldn’t imagine that those kids’ Fred-parents had sent them without food in their knapsacks—probably the kids had just lost track of where it was, or even dropped it in the hubbub back at the airport.

  “Okay, if you don’t have food, it’s no problem,” I said. “I’m sure everybody else has more than enough to share, for as many meals as we need. As soon as the plane levels off, take out your food, if you have it, and divide it into two piles: one, what you want to keep for yourself, and the other, what you would be willing to give away.”

  The girl with the trembly chin started biting her lip. I looked down at my hands, which were holding on to the seats on either side of me. I didn’t really need to hold on anymore, did I? The plane hadn’t jumped or jolted or swooped suddenly to the side in, oh, at least five minutes.

  “Okay, I think the plane has leveled off enough that you can start dividing up your food now,” I said. “Do I have any volunteers to help me pick up the extra food and pass it out to the kids without food?”

  Lots of hands went up once again.

  Over the next several hours I passed out food and water bottles, I took little kids to the bathroom, I tucked blankets around drowsy toddlers longing for naps, I sang lullabies. After some of the kids started complaining about being thirsty, I found a little kitchenette at the back of the plane stocked with huge water jugs, so I could refill drinks. I had help with all those tasks—I deputized every kid over the age of seven except for Edwy. And even Edwy got a bunch of kids involved in a card game of some sort, so I guess he was keeping them from crying. At least he was doing that.

  The adults never came out of their compartment. They kept their door shut.

  It was just as well.

  Finally, long after the whole plane had slipped into darkness, there came a moment when I was sure every other Fredtown child was sound asleep. I walked down the aisle one last time, glancing at sisters and brothers cuddling together, preschoolers holding on to toddlers’ hands, big kids slouched down so smaller children could use their shoulders as pillows. And then I slipped back into my own seat beside Bobo. I slid Bobo’s head onto my lap, and he sighed in his sleep, relaxing his body completely.